A communion of sister churches.
Autocephalous churches — Greek, Russian, Antiochian, and more — one faith with no single head; joining is by baptism and chrismation.
Orthodoxy is organized as autocephalous churches — self-heading, each with its own patriarch or archbishop, in communion with one another rather than under one another. Constantinople holds a primacy of honor without jurisdiction. The arrangement's strength is that it lets Orthodoxy be genuinely local: Greek, Russian, Serbian, Romanian, Antiochian churches with their own languages and customs. Its weakness is on display in the current Constantinople-Moscow rupture over Ukraine, since no mechanism exists to resolve a dispute between equals.
The same ground, other faiths
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